At the end of 2012 a gravestone was found in Xi’an, the former Tang capital Chang’an. It is cut with a long Chinese text and seventeen short lines in runiform Turkic, the script of the Old Turkic inscriptions. The stone is kept in the Datangxishi Museum in the same city.[1] The Chinese heading of the first photographs names an Uyghur prince, Ge Chuo, and the editors of the runiform text read the name as Qarï Čor Tegin.[1]

Find and editions

Two photographs of the stone appeared on a Chinese website on 17 February 2013, under a heading that names an Uyghur prince, Ge Chuo.[2] The first scholarly presentation followed on 7 April 2013 at Peking University, where Rybatzki and Wu gave the first reading of the runiform text.[3] Editions or readings of the runiform part have since come from Ölmez, from Alyılmaz with the Chinese text by Luo Xin, from Zhang Tieshan and from Ariz and Aydın. They differ in details of reading.[3]

The text

The runiform text is short, one or two words to a line.[4] It gives part of the genealogy of the Uyghurs and words that are not attested before.[4]

In line 12, one reading has karı çor tegin sını yoγı tawγaç kan yoγladdı.[5] The word sın means “grave”. It is the first time it appears in a runiform text.[6] The sign for the s is the back-vowel sign, so the word has a back vowel.[5] Tekin and Clauson derive the word from Chinese, and Clauson from a word for the rear hall of an ancestral temple. Aydın ties it to the Chinese word 寢, which can mean “to sleep” and also the grave of a ruler.[5]

In lines 6 and 7, Ölmez reads the phrase qan totoq atısı with atı in the sense of “grandson”. The usual rendering is “nephew”.[2]

The word sın and the Tariat inscription

The Tariat inscription has a word on its south side, line 5, that has been read in at least eight ways. Some readers take it for a form of sin, “grave”, and others for “you” or “in your hand”. Aydın argues that the back vowel of sın in Xi’an means the word of Tariat cannot be read sinläg.[6] See the Tariat inscription.

References

  1. ^ a b Aydın 2013, p. 161–162
  2. ^ a b Aydın 2013, p. 162
  3. ^ a b Aydın 2013, p. 162–163
  4. ^ a b Aydın 2013, p. 165
  5. ^ a b c Aydın 2013, p. 164
  6. ^ a b Aydın 2013, p. 163–165

Sources

Literature

  • Erhan Aydın, Tariat ve Xi’an (Karı Çor Tegin) Yazıtları Işığında sın ‘mezar’ Sözcüğü Üzerine (2013)
  • Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish (1972)

Related

What links here1

Sources
Tariat inscription

Cite this article

Yavuz, Emre-E. “Epitaph of Qarï Čor Tegin (Xi'an).” Turkic Atlas, revised 24 October 2026. https://turkicatlas.org/sources/xian-qari-chor-tegin-epitaph/

Last revised: 24 October 2026